Intel will release RISC-V CPU for the first time! At the same time, China is advancing the RISC-V open-source ecosystem at full speed, resonating with the AIoT era!

According to the latest news, Intels planned first 7nm CPU will be based on the Horse Creek platform in cooperation with SiFive, and the time to market may be advanced to the second half of 2022. Intel official information shows that the new HorseCreek platform will be based on SiFive's high-performance core PerformanceP550, which uses the RISC-V architecture and will use its own 7nm process. The announcement of this news further shows that Intel is optimistic about RISC-V.

On the day before this news was released, the author interviewed three prominent figures in China's RISC-V industry during the RISC-V China Summit. In fact, the construction of China's RISC-V industrial ecology has already had a very clear path, and they have also given very wise insights.

Academician Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated in the keynote speech of this summit that RISC-V has the opportunity to become the three mainstream CPU architectures that go hand in hand with X86 and Arm.

He said that China is a large open-source country in the world. The 14th Five-Year Plan and the long-term plan have been included in the open-source issue, pointing out that it supports open source technology, the development of open source communities, improves open-source intellectual property rights, encourages companies to open source code, and promotes chip design and application. It can be said that the role of open source is highly valued at the national level. China is moving from a big open source country to a strong open-source country. Among them, RISC-V is a very important part.

At the summit site, we also saw vendors from various RISC-V fields such as IP, chips, scientific research institutions, universities, platforms, etc., will use the 5-day conference to fully exchange technologies and markets.

During the summit, the chairman of the RISC-V China Summit, a member of the RISC-V International Foundation Board of Directors, Bao Yungang, deputy director of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wu Yanjun, deputy chief engineer of the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and assistant of the School of Information Technology, ShanghaiTech University Dean Zhou Pingqiang accepted interviews from a small number of media including e-enthusiasts.com.

The development of RISC-V in China is faster than expected. From low- and medium-performance RISC-V processors for the Internet of Things to open-source high-performance processors based on the RISC-V architecture; Combined with increasingly active, the open-source ecosystem is even larger.

Intel's acquisition of SiFive has more advantages than disadvantages

Last week, it was reported that Intel was planning to acquire SiFive, a RISC-V IP manufacturer, for US$2 billion. This has also become a hot topic in the RISC-V industry. At the interview site, the interviewed guests also made no secrets and gave their own wonderful insights. This acquisition must be viewed from both positive and negative aspects, but the guests also agreed that if the acquisition is successful, it will have more advantages than disadvantages.

According to Wu Yanjun's analysis, this acquisition reflects Intel's strategic layout and hopes to open the door to the Internet of Things, mobile terminals, and other fields through SiFive. Similarly, ARM-based processors are entering the server market, represented by Kunpeng, Feiteng, etc., and the Apple M1 chip also shows very good performance on the PC side. Obviously, Intel hopes to reverse the situation where ARM dominates the mobile terminal and penetrates into servers and PCs;

Secondly, Intel hopes to seize a place in the new ecosystem. RISC-V is a new instruction set ecology, Intel can carry out a forward-looking layout.

The third is that Nvidia is acquiring ARM. In the future, the competition between Nvidia and Intel will become the competition of the whole ecology. Nvidia switched from GPU to CPU, and Intel may also want to switch from general-purpose processors to some domain-specific (domain business dedicated) areas. At present, it seems that RISC-V is a better choice, because it is modular and expandable in terms of architecture and technology, and is a very convenient way for customizing dedicated processors.

Of course, there are some concerns in the industry regarding Intels acquisition of SiFive. For example, SiFive has always made a relatively large contribution to the RISC-V community. Will it lose its original community contribution after the acquisition? Even in some core areas, Some of Intels original patents and barriers are introduced into RISC-V?

Wu Yanjun said that the industry is indeed worried, but the acquisition should be viewed more positively. Now that giants like Intel invest in RISC-V, it shows the industry's recognition of RISC-V. It will greatly enhance the confidence of large and small institutions engaged in the RISC-V industry. If Intel acquires it, it is more likely to invest a lot of effort into RISC-V research and development, just like Intel invested in Linux research and development back then. Around 2000, Intel began to invest heavily in promoting the development of the Linux kernel + community. Looking back over the past ten years, Intel has always been the largest contributor to Linux. If it continues to invest in RISC-V in the same way that it treated Linux in the past, it will be a huge benefit for RISC-V. It can even use some of the original design experience on Intel processors to RISC-V, thereby accelerating the maturity of RISC-V.

Bao Yungang believes that although Intels acquisition of SiFive has no real hammer, the signal released is helpful to the entire RISC-V ecosystem and is good news.

RISC-V wants to open up the market, especially in the fields of mobile and IoT, to a large extent, it depends on China. So, how can Intel better integrate RISC-V into China's development strategy? This is a very important idea for combining RISC-V technology with the market. We can use the investment of foreign giants in RISC-V and the better resources in the world to jointly promote the development of RISC-V in the Chinese market through full cooperation. This is a win-win situation.

Analogous to Intel+Windows, Arm+Android, what kind of operating system does RISC-V need?

The combination of software and hardware is an ecological necessity. What kind of operating system will match it in the RISC-V era? Wu Yanjun believes that in the "Wintel" era of PC and the "Double-A" era of mobile intelligence, both refer to the ecology of general-purpose processors and general-purpose operating systems. At the same time, there are actually many special-purpose processors and Dedicated operating systems.

Wu Yanjun proposed that in the RISC-V era, a kind of "Winters" is likely to appear. Adding an "s" at the end means that we may have a set of general operating systems and then match a variety of processors. This is determined by the characteristics of the RISC-V instruction set. The core concept of RISC-V is based on the model of "basic instruction set + extended instruction set". That means that a variety of processors in different fields may be born at the level of "extended instruction set". If each of our processors is equipped with a different set of system software or operating system, maintenance The cost of getting up is very high. So "Winters" means that it is best for us to have a unified system software, and this system software is preferably open source, such as a Linux-based operating system to adapt to different RISC-V processors.

In short, based on the diversified hardware ecology presented by the RISC-V instruction set, there will eventually be a set of standard and world-recognized software infrastructure, including operating systems, compilers, basic libraries, and so on. In this way, developers only need to develop under this set of standard operating systems and SDKs, which is a relatively healthy ecological model for RISC-V in the future.

Interestingly, the round table forum of this summit also had a discussion on the RISC-V operating system. During the live survey on the development prospects of which operating system you are most optimistic about in the AIoT era, the voting results showed that among the six options, everyone is the most The top three optimistic ones are Hongmeng, accounting for more than 55%, Google Fuchsia OS, accounting for 15%, and RT-Thread ranked third, accounting for 12%. Others include FreeRTOS, which accounts for 10%, Ali OS 2%, and others. This shows that in the eyes of participants, Hongmeng has become the most promising operating system.

Open-source high-performance processors appear in RISC-V

RISC-V is not only for the Internet of Things, it continues to make breakthroughs in high-performance processors. Wu Yanjun said that everyone was familiar with the use of RISC-V in the MCU field at the earliest. In the past year or so, Saifang, Xinlai, Allwinner, etc. have all launched processor platforms that can run Linux systems, which is vital to the development of the software ecosystem. , It can continuously prove the upper limit of RISC-V capabilities. The PLCT team of the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is also working closely with Pingtou, Quanzhi, and the Xiangshan processor of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in terms of software ecology.

At this summit, teacher Yungang Bao officially released the open-source high-performance RISC-V processor "Xiangshan". It is an open-source processor core jointly developed by a number of companies led by the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The source code and all design documents are all open sources. Xiangshan has two versions of the architecture. The first version of Yanqi Lake established a code warehouse in June last year and completed the RTL work in April this year. The Yanqi Lake architecture uses TSMCs 28nm process with a frequency of up to 1.3GHz and SPEC CPU2006 up to about 7 cents/GHz. Chips based on the first version of Yanqi Lake will be taped out in mid-July. The future benchmark of this core is the performance level of ARM Cortex-A76.

The second edition of the Nanhu architecture uses SMIC's 14nm process. The target is that the frequency is expected to reach 2GHz, and the SPEC CPU2006 can reach 10 cents/GHz. Nanhu will support bitmap instruction set expansion, new front-end design, branch prediction and decoupling architecture, and better scheduling, support for instruction fusion, and other back-end optimizations. It will also support L2 Cache to achieve higher frequency, throughput, lower latency, and the use of dual-core version tape out, dual-channel DDR, support more peripherals.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences selected Chisel as the hardware design language for computing. According to Bao Yungang, compared with Verilog, Chisel has reduced the amount of code to one-fifth. Not only that, in terms of development tools, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also completed a series of work such as NEMU interpreter, Agent Faker test framework, and Difftest verification framework.

In terms of high-performance processors, at the end of last year, Saifang Technology released the world's leading high-performance processor core based on RISC-V-Tianshu series processors. The processor is based on a 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture, and its main frequency reaches 3.5GHz under TSMCs 7nm process. Earlier, Pingtou introduced the Xuantie 910 RISC-V IP Core, with a single-core performance of 7.1 Caremark/MHz and a main frequency of 2.5GHz. At that time, Pingtou announced the "Puhui Chip" plan, which will fully open the Xuantie 910 IP Core. Developers around the world can download the FPGA code of the processor for free, and quickly carry out chip prototyping and architecture innovation.

The introduction of these high-performance processor cores will expand RISC-V industry applications and accelerate the expansion of the RISC-V industry ecosystem.

Open source does not mean free, pay attention to the construction of the intellectual property

As Academician Ni Guangnan mentioned, open-source accounts for a larger proportion of the new generation of information technology as a whole, and open-source software in AI, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and other fields account for 80% of all software. The ratio of hardware and software personnel in ICT companies is about 8 to 2. From this estimate, the contribution rate of open source to ICT companies can reach 60%. Whoever embraces open-source embraces the future of information technology.

RISC-V, as an open-source instruction set and the ecology of the corresponding open-source processor CPU, intellectual property is the core element. Bao Yungang analyzed that today's Linux is so vigorous and powerful, an important factor is that in its early days, an organization called "OIN" was established about 15 years ago. Open innovation network (OIN) is a non-profit organization. Its main job is to aggregate operating system-related patents into a "patent pool". Among the thousands of members in this organization, they will not use Linux. Prosecuting all parties above is equivalent to forming a joint protection mechanism to jointly protect the growth of Linux.

Therefore, Bao Yungang suggested that the development of RISC-V can learn from the "OIN" model and jointly build a shared "patent pool". Use the protection mechanism of the patent pool to protect the intellectual property rights of all parties. Similar to the domestic AVS patent sharing pool in the field of audio and video coding and decoding, there is also a global AOT patent sharing pool.

Wu Yanjun believes that in an ecosystem if over-protection will hinder innovation, it will not encourage innovation without protection. In the software field, the OIN model used in the past has actually effectively solved such problems. After the RISC-V open-source instruction set and open-source hardware come in, software and hardware must jointly face some new problems of intellectual property rights.

He believes that the most important thing at present is that we need to recognize the value of open source contributions. The core of open-source free is "free" rather than "free." In open-source software, you can also have core competitiveness, and you can also provide professional support. Services gain commercial benefits, and users must also cultivate the awareness of "paying", so as to motivate those who contribute in open source to make more and better contributions.

The open-source ecosystem of RISC-V's software and hardware is getting better and better. Wu Yanjun mentioned two key points. First, we need to provide better open-source IP. For example, the Xiangshan high-performance processor core launched by Yungang Baos team has continued to mature in reliability and production process links, which will greatly reduce the R&D cost of the processor.

The second is that the basic software, especially the compiler and operating system, can provide many general and effective solutions for different RISC-V processors.

The ideal situation is: 90% of the basic software and hardware work is ready, and the manufacturer only needs to do the remaining 10% of the work to form its own unique product. If this goal is achieved, the RISC-V ecosystem will grow rapidly. Once the ecology is in a positive cycle, more people will participate and more solutions will be formed, and this ecology will develop rapidly.

RISC-V has entered university teaching, industry-university-research co-construction

Universities are important platforms for talent training and RISC-V promotion, promoting original cultivation and stimulating more innovation. Zhou Pingqiang, assistant dean of the School of Information, ShanghaiTech University, said that RISC-V has been embedded as a course in the school's teaching content. As the first batch of cultivators and users, students can give more feedback during continuous trials and participate in ecological construction. The coursework design of students is also carried out in cooperation with the company to complete the teaching content together to maintain the synchronization and timeliness of experts, students, and companies.

He also emphasized that certain promotion and cooperation mechanisms are being established between universities and universities and between universities and enterprises. For example, a book about Hummingbird processors written by Xinlai Technology CEO Hu Zhenbo has received widespread attention in domestic universities, and this book has also been published in Shanghai. University of Science and Technology is included in teaching.

In 2012, Shanghai University of Science and Technology and the School of Electronic Information Engineering of the University of Berkeley signed a cooperation agreement. The agreement includes teacher training, course introduction, scientific research cooperation, and so on. RISC-V was first born at the University of California, Berkeley. Two textbooks for the computer architecture course of ShanghaiTech University were imported from Berkeley. The latest textbook based on RISC-V was also written by a professor in Berkeley, California.

If the domestic IC talent gap is large, there may be fewer RISC-V-related talents. At present, universities are accelerating the cultivation of talents. Taking Shanghai University of Science and Technology as an example, according to reports, RISC-V-related courses in the entire undergraduate stage of teaching are about 200 people, and graduate students have added "computer architecture" courses, about 150 people. Generally speaking, more than ten universities, including Shanghai University of Science and Technology, have opened RISC-V related courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and are accelerating the training of RISC-V talents.